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From: Jasper
Date: 4/4/03
Time: 2:23:01 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.192.11
This is something I wanted to get into a long time ago with Prien when Miss Marple pointed out the information that could have been lost in the transcript of Lange and Vannatter’s interview with O.J. You all know how disastrously that turned out.
The issue was how “little” changes, omissions and “add-ons” in writing could make big differences in interpreting what really took place in a VERBAL exchange.
I made my own transcript of the Larry King Show where Jim Moret, sitting in for Larry King, interviewed Fuhrman and Paul Minor, the man who gave Fuhrman a polygraph test. I used my videotape of the show to check and recheck every line, every pause and every “ah” in the interview. In one place I noted in italicized brackets a “small, quick smile.” In Iago, chapter 23: Fuhrman’s Polygraph (pages 335-337) you will find an excerpt from MY transcript. In chapter 25: A Minor Disagreement (pages 363-364) Pat used transcripts that the network (I don’t recall if it was CNN or Court-TV) put online. In those transcripts, the “ahs,” the sharp breaks and the long pauses were edited out. You have to go back to the videotape to find them.
Walraven’s transcripts are much better at including the small verbal imperfections but when you compare the transcripts to the tapes you sometimes find differences. For example, the court transcripts quote Robert Heidstra as saying he heard, “Hey, hey, hey.” I quote him as saying he heard, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” – three distinct exclamations. It was enough difference to get me to CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY that Heidstra heard someone other than Ron Goldman make those exclamations.
Because I had Heidstra in the wrong alley, I made a huge mistake in assuming that Elsie Tistaert’s dog might have barked because it saw the killer’s partner entering the gate just before Heidstra heard the “Hey! Hey! Hey!” It turned out to be a fortunate error because it put me on the path of thinking about a reason for the exclamations and the argument that followed, other than an exchange between the man being attacked and his killer. At that point the idea of Ron being “surprised” by his attacker didn’t make sense anyway.
A killer wearing shoes that he chose to leave ONE SET of incriminating shoeprints in blood who was caught off guard by his lookout entering the bloody scene did make sense. Now the “blood flows” that Prien and I had noted were all wrong and the position of Nicole’s body also made sense. Nicole’s body could not have been positioned better to hide a second set of shoeprints that weren’t supposed to be there.
The killer had to make mistakes. Everybody does, especially when we act in haste or try to respond too quickly to a situation we did not anticipate. The killer had to make mistakes on the murder scene. He had to make them at O.J.’s home. If he testified, he had to make them on the witness stand. The people he got to lie, mislead and cover for him had to make mistakes, too. Start with the “little things” that Phillips said about “his partner” Fuhrman and “a” detective named Roberts. Work your way though the places in the transcript where he begins to stumble. You will begin to see his state of mind. That’s when he makes it clear that Fuhrman was not his partner. Now look at where Marcia begins to stumble with Fuhrman’s role in the investigation… --Jasper